Let The Mystery Be

I’ve found that when it comes to HBO’s The Leftovers, there’s really no middle ground. When I talk to somebody who’s seen the show, bringing it up always generates one of two passionate responses: That show is brilliant – why don’t more people watch it!? or That show is a dump truck full of anteater shit – why does anybody watch it!? I’m firmly in the “it’s brilliant” camp, but I can see how people could hate the show. It’s extremely depressing, even by HBO standards, the first season had some weaknesses, and it can be hard to put your finger on who or what exactly the show is about from one week to the next. But if that doesn’t bother you, The Leftovers is easily one of the best things on TV right now – but to appreciate it, you have to make peace with the fact that this show is going to ask more questions than it answers.

The Leftovers is set three years after 140 million people – two percent of the world’s population – inexplicably vanish without a trace, never to be seen again, in an event that comes to be known as the Sudden Departure. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to who disappears and who’s left behind. Men, women, and children of all religious faiths from all over the world are among the departed. So are the Pope, Condoleezza Rice, Anthony Bourdain, and the entire cast of the ‘80s sitcom Perfect Strangers (sans Mark Linn-Baker, who has only faked his disappearance in order to start a new life in Mexico.)

If you need to know why these people disappeared and where they went, The Leftovers is going to piss you off. This isn’t one of those mystery-type shows where the protagonists walk around in dark rooms with flashlights discovering clues and learning about ancient prophecies until they dramatically uncover The Truth. On The Leftovers, all the main characters have long since given up on trying to figure out what happened. There’s hints in the background that some people are still on the case – researchers, the government, assorted cults and nutjobs – but none of them seem to be making any breakthroughs, and even if they were, that’s not the story this show is interested in telling.  

Instead of chasing answers, the characters we follow on The Leftovers spend their time engaging in a variety of really unhealthy coping mechanisms to try and process the fact that they’ve been left out what appears to be a bonafide act of God. Suburban police chief Kevin Garvey sleepwalks and shoots feral dogs late at night with a stranger who may or may not be a hallucination. His wife has left him to join a cult of mute, chainsmoking nihilists dressed in white, whose only purpose seems to be sabotaging the community’s attempts at healing and closure. Over the course of the first season, Garvey grows close to Nora Durst, a widow who still buys breakfast cereal for her departed husband and children and occasionally hires prostitutes to come over and shoot her while she wears a Kevlar vest.

For my money, this freakshow of human emotion is a lot more interesting than the mystery that touched it all off. Besides, it’s not like we’re lacking for shows where mysteries get solved over time – for that you’ve got The Blacklist, or Scandal, or Homeland. The Leftovers is about grieving people spinning out of control, and while it’s not necessarily lighthearted entertainment, it makes for gripping and relatable drama.

The worst moments of the first season were when The Leftovers flirted with telling a big story that answered questions. The first half of season 1 was dragged down by a tired plotline about Garvey’s estranged son and a charismatic cult leader he’d fallen in with, all of it heavy on prophecy, faith, and Lost-type bullshit. The best episodes were the ones that sidelined the principal cast and dug deep into the lives and struggles of other townsfolk who until that point had looked like bit players – particularly the local reverend, who in the course of one brilliant episode goes from a wild-eyed Bible-thumping dickhead to one of the show’s most tragic figures. Episodes like that one kept me onboard with the show when it was getting insufferable. To showrunner Damon Lindeloff’s credit, he appears to have realized that The Leftovers is at its best when it’s gradually fleshing out its eccentric, wounded characters and the connections between them, like A Prairie Home Companion but with more abject despair. 

The second season of The Leftovers has done an admirable job of correcting for the unevenness of the first. The show’s strongest and most compelling characters have picked up and moved from upstate New York to the small town of Jarden, Texas, which has become something of a metaphysical tourist attraction by virtue of being the only town on Earth where not a single resident vanished in the Departure. There’s new mysteries in Jarden, a more focused story, and also black people, who were largely absent from the first season. (The opening credits are better now, too.)

As I write this we’re halfway through the second season, and every episode has been firing on all cylinders. If you gave up on The Leftovers last year, now would be a good time to try and get back on board, because I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that it’s on track to become one of those shows that everybody talks about. Give it a second chance and you can expect to see several Emmy-worthy performances, atmospheric directing, and some excellent writing that finds a lot of room for idiosyncratic humor between all the depressing stuff (a landlord, on why people can’t stay the night in one of his commercial properties: “The bathrooms, they’re set up to handle day poops. Not night poops.”)

About the only thing you shouldn’t expect from this season of The Leftovers are answers. But that’s okay. The Leftovers is a show about questions – answering them would be like Walter White going back to teaching chemistry. 

Buying Time

Last week I quit my job so I could take another job where I’ll get paid less money to work fewer hours. This was a tough call for two reasons: 1) I attach a lot of my self esteem to the amount of money I’m making - which is a totally mature and healthy thing to do - and 2) The job I’m quitting is the first job I’ve had where I don’t spend every day fantasizing about quitting. It's strange, but I genuinely enjoy spending time around my boss and coworkers, even if the work we do – designing packages for wireless routers – is boring enough to be the sort of fake job a hitman or a secret agent would claim to have as a cover story.

Quitting a job is unfamiliar territory for me – most of the time I’m the guy who gets laid off. And having tried both, I can confidently say that getting laid off is way more fun. When I’m the victim, I get sympathy and free drinks. But when I’m the one who decides to walk away from a job, there’s none of that camaraderie and goodwill – I just sit around thinking, Gee, I hope I didn’t just completely ruin my life with that decision.

The whole reason I’ve stuck with this boring job that is neither creatively challenging nor particularly interesting is because of what a great work environment it is. I spend over two hours a day driving to and from this job because I get to spend my day trading banter with a bunch of smart, lively, quirky people in between relatively short meetings about Best Buy kiosk designs and the finer points of international trademark and copyright law.

I don’t particularly enjoy writing about routers’ features, but since I have to have some sort of job I may as well have one that doesn’t make me miserable. The work I do doesn’t require too much thought or effort, the company cafeteria is superb, and my cubicle is a pleasant enough climate controlled place to fritter away the afternoon reading Rolling Stone articles about drug smugglers and Iraq. Best of all, after the cafeteria closes at 2:00 the cooks put all the leftover pizza out in one of the break rooms, so every day I can usually count on one or two pieces of free, room temperature za to tide me over while I run out the clock until 5:00.

This job has been so comfortable and low-key that I was starting to feel like I could keep doing it forever. And that’s a problem, because I didn’t move to LA to write router boxes – but while I’ve been working this job, router boxes are about the only thing I have been writing. I’m trying to tackle several different projects in my spare time, but between working, commuting, and everything else that happens before I go to sleep I’ve only been able to devote about half an hour a week to each one.

Beyond that, when I have a job I tend to make more stupid spending decisions because I know I’ve got money coming in to make up for them. I should go grocery shopping – nah, I’ll just get takeout every night this week. I’ll pay for it with my never ending stream of Job Money. Thanks to smart financial choices like this, in five months of working at this company I’ve been making almost exactly as much as I’ve been spending.

So I’m commuting hours every day to work at a job that’s pleasant but not stimulating, which takes up lots of time I’d otherwise be spending chasing my dreams, all so I can make just enough money to break even. It took me a long time to put all this together, but once I did I knew it was time to leave this land of friendly people and free pizza behind and find something that worked better for me.

At the job I’m starting next month I’ll be writing event description blurbs for a company that sells discount tickets for concerts and sporting events. It’ll be slightly more creative than my old job – everything I write for a router box is some variation on “Holy shit, this thing is going to make your Internet so fucking fast” – but the real draw is that I’ll be able to work from home every day. As much as I love the office I work in right now, it can't hold a candle to working from home, where there’s no small talk about weekend plans and I can fart whenever the need arises.

Best of all, the new job starts at 30 hours a week. That’s ten extra hours that I won’t be working for The Man, plus another 15 hours a week that I’m not driving to and from working for The Man, which works out to an extra day every week that I get to spend working on things that matter to me. It’ll be less money, but I can make it work if I kick my Baja Fresh addiction.

For my self esteem’s sake I’m not looking at it as a pay cut, but just pretending that I’m using that money to buy myself a bunch of extra time every week. I’ve got my fingers crossed that trading takeout for time will be wind up being a good investment in the long run. 

Less Vegas

We stayed at the MGM Grand in a 26th story timeshare apartment that we rented from some Armenian guy on AirBnB. It wasn’t until we arrived in Las Vegas that we realized the timeshare towers were a good quarter mile away from the rest of the hotel and casino, connected by long, airporty corridors. After dropping off our bags, we walked for half an hour through what turns out to be the world’s largest hotel and resort complex before seeing daylight again at the casino’s main entrance. Finally stepping out into the 102 degree heat of the Strip, the first thing I saw was a homeless man lying on his back in a flower planter, vomiting into the air, two bored cops watching him.

“Oh, come on,” One of them was saying. “If you’re going to do that, at least turn your head. That’s disgusting.”

I’d only been to Las Vegas once before, when my parents surprised me and took me there for my 13th birthday. We went to Hoover Dam and saw Blue Man Group – they weren’t playing at Hoover Dam, obviously, although it would have been incredible if they did – and had a good time overall. But as a 13 year old, I didn’t get a chance to experience Vegas for what it really is. It didn’t help that this trip took place maybe six weeks after 9/11, when people were still kind of nervous about gathering in large groups at symbols of American capitalism.

When I went to Vegas with my friends this past weekend to celebrate another friend’s birthday there, I was excited to finally get the full experience. And I feel like I did. And I had fun. And now I’m just so glad the experience is over.

I think Vegas is one of the few places left where humans’ long-atrophied hunter-gatherer instincts are put to the test. Over the course of two days we spent most of our time walking long distances through punishing heat in search of food, navigating by mythical landmarks. Past the Great Pyramid and across from the Water That Dances To Elvis Songs lies the buffet that will nourish our people for the trip to Paris! We dedicated a lot of brainpower to trying to chart a roundabout course from one end of the Strip to the other that kept us indoors and out of the heat as much as possible.

One morning, in search of the buffet at Caesar’s Palace, we left the MGM Grand and spent half an hour zigzagging across skybridges and through casinos on the way there. Finally we popped out of a heavily air conditioned luxury shopping center to find ourselves staring back up at the MGM Grand again. Lost in the desert, starving, now walking in circles – it felt like only a matter of time until a bunch of Comanches came along and buried us in the sand up to our heads.

When we finally made it to Caesar’s we put our names on the waiting list for the buffet and then, with an hour to kill before we could take our place at the feed trough, all went our separate ways in search of our preferred games of chance.

I’m not a gambler. In video games that feature gambling modes, like Fallout: New Vegas or Red Dead Redemption, my inability to remember the rules of blackjack or poker – even when they’re written right there on the screen – has lost me thousands of virtual dollars, and I don’t want to replicate that in real life. And even if I did know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em, I still probably wouldn’t gamble. I mean, they didn’t get the money to build 15 of the world’s largest hotels in the middle of the desert because lots and lots of gamblers were winning.  

Still, we had time to kill and I had a $10 bill in my pocket, so I went off in search of a slot machine. Maybe “search” isn’t the right word, since there were 30 to 50 slot machines in my field of vision at the moment I decided I wanted to try one. I walked for a few minutes through the forest of themed slot machines, trying to decide what sort of colorful glowing artwork I wanted to look at while wasting $10: Sexy German barmaid? Sexy Arabian princess? Laughing Ellen DeGeneres? The cast of Shrek 2?

It occurred to me that I could spend my entire weekend looking for the slot machine theme that best fit my mood and it still wouldn’t improve my chances, so I gingerly sat down on the greasy vinyl seat in front of an equally greasy generic slot machine, brushed leftover cigarette ash away from the buttons, and inserted my $10.

My understanding of slot machines was that you put in money, pull a crank, and then watch flashing lights tell you that you lost. But the crank on this slot machine turned out to be purely decorative, and as I tried to figure out which of the several buttons I was supposed to push, I inadvertently bet all $10 on one go. The numbers spun around, a couple lights flashed, I didn’t win any money, and then the machine went dark again, waiting for me to give it more of my disposable income.

I guess I don’t get it.

Here’s what I love about Vegas: I’m an indoors type of person, and Vegas does indoors very well.

Outside on the Strip the sidewalks are always packed with sweaty people with their mouths open, there’s always heavy, noisy traffic, and it’s always about 100 degrees. But as soon as you walk into a casino it’s all airy utopian spaces – high ceilings, wide corridors, and generous air conditioning. Everything is pristine and pleasant, from the lighting to the volume of the music to whatever expensive technology is sucking up all the cigarette fumes from the people smoking indoors. Are you hungry? Well, there’s 60 different restaurants spanning a variety of cuisines in this same building, several of them staffed by the best chefs on Earth. Do you want a drink? Because if you do, there’s a different bar every 15 feet, each one stocked with hundreds of colorful, friendly-looking bottles of liquor. Do you have to go to the bathroom? Good news: There’s always one close by, and it’ll always be as clean as if Adrian Monk was the head janitor.

That’s really all I need to have a good time: Climate control, good food, and a reasonably hygienic place to take a dump should the need arise.

This gnocchi was so incredible that I feel kind of bad putting this picture of it right after a poop joke.  

Here’s what made me happy to leave Vegas: After a day or so, all I could think about was how much time and effort and money and resources were going into catering to my every whim. You can only spend so much time indulging and watching the thousands of other people around you indulging before you start to just feel kind of gross inside. It took me a little over 36 hours to realize that I’d had my fill of opulence, luxury, and hedonism and was about ready to go back to being a productive member of society again.

That said, I do miss the bathrooms.

Raging Boehner

In the first season of The Wire, there’s these drug dealers, and they’re some seriously bad dudes. They torture people and kill children and sell lots of and lots of heroin, and watching it you find yourself thinking, “Man, these drug dealers are the worst. I sure hope the cops get their shit together, because these drug dealers need to go down hard.”

But then, a couple seasons later, a bunch of new drug dealers show up, and these guys are even worse than the original bunch of drug dealers! They kill and torture people too, but unlike the old drug dealers who only did that for reasons relating to their heroin-selling business, half the time these guys just kill innocent people for fun. And then you find yourself thinking, “Shit, I miss the old drug dealers! I mean, yeah, they were awful, but at least they had a code! These new drug dealers, it’s like all they want to do is wreck shit!”

And I think about that all the time when I read about the white collar Fight Club that the House Republicans have become. I mean, when John Boehner first got elected to Congress in the 90s he was considered one of the most ardently conservative members of the House. Now a crop of radical Tea Party legislators just forced him out of office because to them, he’s not conservative enough. I should enjoy watching the Republican Party chew John Boehner up and spit him out, but honestly, I can’t help but feel sorry for the guy.

Sure, I still hate Boehner’s ass-backwards positions on everything from women’s rights to climate change, and I can’t say I’ve ever been a fan of the way the third most powerful man on Earth starts blubbering uncontrollably every time he goes on national television. But at least he was polite, and – more importantly – sincerely believed that the United States government should both exist and pay its bills in a timely fashion. And it really says something about the state of our political system when that’s a compliment.

“Oh yeah, he’s a great surgeon – he never gives his patients handjobs while they’re knocked out.”

“Billy’s kindergarten teacher is the best. She doesn’t let them play with loaded handguns, and on top of that, not once has she given them cigarettes!”

John Boehner at least understood that he wasn’t going to be able to do all the terrible things he wanted to do. He was willing to compromise and work across the aisle if it meant he could make some progress on getting some of his terrible things done, even if the other side got to score some points too. But trying to run a House majority full of angry wingnuts and people terrified of going against them lest they get a primary challenge from an angry wingnut, he was the legislative equivalent of one mom trying to chaperone a dozen 6 year olds at a pizza party. Sure, Congress didn’t get a whole lot of governing done during his time in charge, but a lot more stuff would have gotten broken if he hadn’t been there.

With him out the door, the six-year-olds are effectively chaperoning their own pizza party. Do I even need to explain why that’s a bad thing? Here’s a video of why that’s a bad thing:

The Tea Partiers who made Boehner walk the plank are about as interested in governing as Mary-Kate and Ashley are in making a conventional, nutritiously-balanced pizza. These are people who campaigned and got elected on their ability to say “No” to a raft of things they don’t like in the angriest, flashiest way. It’s not enough that they’re unilaterally opposed to health insurance for poor people and taking action on climate change – a lot of them believe it’s okay for the government to just not pay its creditors on time. And now, a few months before our bills are due, these guys have just muscled out the one person capable of making them fall in line.

The drug dealers on The Wire taught me two things: 1) Never, ever go to Baltimore, and 2) the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. I predict that in the coming months, as the Tea Partiers elect a Speaker who they feel is sufficiently divorced from reality to lead them, we’re all going to wish that our old, orange, weepy devil had never left.​ 

The White Room

Not long after starting my current job I gave up the fight against traffic. No more Waze, no more tricky alternate routes – I surrendered completely and accepted that I had become the stereotypical LA commuter, spending 45 minutes in the car every morning and over an hour getting home every night. Determined to use all this time in the car for some sort of constructive purpose, I stocked up on audio books and podcasts, but what I’m finding is that the only thing I really want to do when I’m alone in the car stuck in traffic is make running commentary on everything that’s pissing me off about other drivers.

“Oh, you’re just going to come to a complete stop before making that right turn? Nah, that’s cool, we’ll just wait right here behind you.”

“Merge at freeway speeds, dipshit! Come on! Amateur hour!”

“Go. Go. Go. Go-go-go-go-go-go-go-GO-GO-GO!”

“Let me- Let me- Let me pass. Come on. Come on. Let me pass. Come on. Come on. No, don’t- Seriously? Fuck you, pal! Fuck you!”

Still, it’s good as a kind of cheap therapy – I can spend an hour and a half every day getting the griping out of my system when there’s nobody around to hear it. Whatever’s left after that goes on the blog. I was getting used to this arrangement when traffic, perhaps unaware that I had surrendered, went on the offensive again.

School just started in LA, which, like the movie Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, has taken something I didn’t think could possibly be any worse and proved me wrong. The intersection of the two freeways I use to get to work every morning is already famous for being the most congested patch of freeway in America. Now that hundreds of thousands of kids are being taken to and from schools all along this route, each morning and afternoon it ceases to be a freeway and exists only as a warning to other cultures, a ghost story urban planners tell their children, a monument to man’s arrogance.

Now, on a good day, my commute to work takes close to an hour and a half, and my commute home has been edging pretty close to two hours. And all I can think about when I sit in traffic is that the duration of a one way trip to or from work is equal to or longer than most movies. It takes me longer to get to work in the morning than it takes the boys in Stand By Me to find that kid’s body and learn important lessons about manhood. My drive home takes as long as the entire saga of Max, Furiosa, and Immortan Joe in Mad Max: Fury Road – but although it has cars, roads, and ample fury on my part, my commute is considerably less interesting.

Everything else about my job is downright pleasant at the moment, except that getting to and from it takes 15 to 20 hours of every week. About the time I realized that my weekly commute was the same time commitment as a part-time job without the pay, I knew that something was going to have to change. But because I can’t work from home and I can’t in good conscience quit, my list of “Things I Can Realistically Change” was pretty short.

Recently, though, I had an epiphany. For most of my career I’ve made a point of bolting out of whatever office I’m working in at the exact second I’m allowed to leave, because 1) fuck The Man and 2) I tell myself I need to get home and write, even if I just wind up zoning out in front of a Frasier episode I’ve already seen four times. Unfortunately, doing this at my current job means I get onto America’s most congested freeway right at 5:00, when traffic is as bad as can be.

But starting last week, instead of leaving the building at 5:00, I just leave my desk and take my laptop into a small, harshly lit, white walled auxiliary room down the hall from my cubicle, outfitted with a desk, a phone, and a hard chair. I then sit on the hard chair and write until the freeways clear out around 7:00.

The only reason the freeway is this empty is because this picture was taken during the LA riots. 

It’s only been a week, but I’m pretty satisfied with the results so far. When I leave the office at 5:00, I usually get home pretty close to 7:00. When I leave at 7:00, I can be circling my block looking for a parking space by 7:45. Not only does this minimize my driving time and maximize my writing time, but I’ve also found that it’s a lot easier for me to get writing done in The White Room, where the only thing to distract me is a 10 year old landline phone and an occasional horrific industrial grinding sound from the adjacent elevator shaft.

Before The White Room, there were plenty of evenings where I’d get home from my massive commute and be too worn out for creativity. Now, even if I don’t do jack shit after getting back to my apartment and taking my pants off, I can feel less guilty because I put in a couple of hours writing at the office.

It’s still not an ideal arrangement. An ideal arrangement would be me getting paid to write scripts professionally, with my paychecks hand delivered by Alison Brie. But until I can work something like that out, The White Room has made an unbearable situation bearable. Plus, it’s reassuring to know that I’m still capable of doing good work in an environment where people expect me to wear pants. 

Summer's End

Growing up, I didn’t just love summer vacation – I based my entire perception of time around it. When I’d picture a twelve month calendar in my head, I saw the months in three rows: At the top there was January through May, in the middle there was June, July and August, and then along the bottom there was September through December. In my head, the school months in the top and bottom rows appeared bland and dreary, like dead grass or an empty parking lot, while the three months in the middle had a bright, happy sheen, like the shots in an allergy medication commercial after the person uses the decongesting nasal spray.

It was like a shit sandwich in reverse – three months that made life worth living stuck between two lengthy blocks of waking up early, trudging to school in the rain, and looking at the clock after an hour of science class only to find that I’d been there for eight minutes. On those cold, dark mornings, the thing that kept me going was the knowledge that eventually I’d make it to the middle part of my mental calendar, when I’d have three months to just do me.

I’ve read that summer vacation is an absolute disaster from an educational standpoint – that one of the reasons America’s test scores lag so far behind other countries’ is that teachers have to spend the first couple months of the year re-teaching kids things they learned last year but forgot in the intervening three-month haze of Capri Sun and video games. I’m sure that if I’d known all those lazy childhood summers were making me stupider, I still would’ve been okay with it. Then and now, I think spending three months hammering out video game fan fiction and making repeated trips to the video store did a lot more for my personal development than three more months of trying and failing to understand how to multiply fractions.

The thought that one day I’d have to work twelve months out of the year made me regard adulthood with fear and dread. What was the point of being alive if I couldn’t spend a quarter of the year doing whatever the hell I wanted to do? It made growing up look pretty bleak – I figured that lack of summer vacation was the reason adults were always the ones starting wars and murdering people.

But since leaving school I’ve been surprised to find that I really don’t miss summer vacation at all. I’m not even jealous of the kids I see out messing around on their bikes as I drive to the office on summer mornings. What I’m realizing is that I spent so much of my summer vacations dreading the end of the summer that in a way it’s kind of a relief to not even have it in the first place.

Because I spent the whole school year putting summer on a pedestal, the end of it could get pretty traumatic. By the time I was in middle school, I’d start fretting and moping about the impending end of the summer sometime in early July. August was my least favorite month of the year. All those progressively earlier and chillier evenings just felt like a cruel reminder from nature that school was going to start at the end of the month and adults would once again try to teach me how to multiply fractions.

I dreaded the fall exactly as much as all the pumpkin-spice craving white girls in your news feed right now love it. By September first I’d be settled into a deep malaise that would slowly lift one day at a time over the next nine months as the following summer grew closer. It was an exhausting thing to do to myself every year.

For me at least, it's a lot easier in the long run to handle 12 months of work than nine months of school. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I love my job, but at least they pay me to show up and nobody there tries to make me do math or play dodgeball. There’s no homework to do after I leave, somebody’s always bringing in donuts, and I can usually count on pockets of downtime during the day to just do me, even if all that means is writing a blog instead of playing Goldeneye for the afternoon.

That isn’t to say it wouldn’t be relaxing to have three months off. But honestly, it’s almost more relaxing to finally be able to enjoy the changing of the leaves without experiencing a full blown existential crisis. 

BREAKING: Annual Burning Man Festival Moved To Alternate Venue

WINNEMUCCA, NV – Citing record high temperatures, nearby wildfires, and an infestation of millions of biting, foul-smelling insects, organizers of the annual Burning Man festival have announced an unprecedented last-minute change in venue for the weeklong event, set to be attended by a who’s who of artists, creatives, entertainers, and Silicon Valley wunderkinds starting Monday.

“Leaving the Playa in Black Rock Desert was not an easy decision for any of us,” Burning Man founder and organizer Larry Harvey said in a statement earlier today. “However, the safety and comfort of Burners is our primary concern, which is why we’re excited to announce that the 2015 Burning Man festival will be held in the Sagebrush Ballroom at the Best Western Airport Plaza Hotel in Winnemucca!”

“The Sagebrush Ballroom is to the LEFT of the reception desk, first door on the right past the Silver Rush Cafe.” Harvey clarified in a subsequent statement.

The decision to relocate the outdoor festival from 1.5 square miles of open desert to a 3300 square foot hotel ballroom has generated considerable controversy among Burning Man ticket holders, some 70,000 of whom are expected to begin arriving at the Best Western this weekend.

“I’m definitely bummed,” said four-time attendee Chad Durcey, 31, a self-described social media consultant from Los Angeles. “Burning Man is all about building and sharing art spaces that create contrasting psychological paradigms. This year I was going to make a tent shaped like a three-headed dragon where each head is an entrance leading to a separate chamber with a different elemental theme – fire, water, wind, you get the picture. But I just got an email from [Best Western facilities manager] Carol Watkins telling me that the only building materials allowed in the ballroom are vinyl chairs. It’s a challenge.”

“It’ll be nice having A/C, though.” Durcey added.

Oakland-based social media specialist Brad DeLuca, 29, also had mixed feelings. “Doing MDMA with thousands of people in the desert is a rare exercise in achieving a sort of group gestalt, resulting in a shared sense of unity and purpose that defies explanation. Doing MDMA in a hotel ballroom is a Tame Impala concert. I mean, I’ll still have a great time, but it’s going to be a lot harder to sell that as a life changing experience when I talk about it on Facebook for the next three weeks.”

27-year-old social media manager Jordyn Santos, who made the drive down from Seattle, said she felt bad for first-time attendees. “Seeing The Man burn last year, I felt a profound sense of absolute peace and unity with nature, the environment, and Earth itself. Now I hear The Man is only going to be like two feet tall, and they’re building him out of popsicle sticks, and that bitch Carol [Watkins] won’t even let us set him on fire. On the other hand, those bugs on the Playa sounded really gross, so I guess it’s for the best.”

In response to multiple requests for comment, Ms. Watkins forwarded us a copy of the Best Western facilities rules and regulations, which state that “…no cigarettes, e-cigarettes, personal vaporizers, pipes, or other open flames shall be allowed on the premises. Any failure to comply will result in immediate termination of event permits and forfeiture of deposit.”

By Sunday evening, a steady stream of early arrivals in camper vans and heavily modified art cars had begun to pour into this sleepy desert town from all directions, converging on the Best Western. At the Silver Rush Café, a table full of Burners in Steampunk pirate garb could be seen attempting to exchange several hand-carved pieces of rhinestone encrusted driftwood for two Denver omelets. Another group gathered at the ballroom door to poke their heads inside and scope out potential campsites.

“As soon as they open up tomorrow, my friends and I are going to run and try and grab that back corner,” said Megan Billings, 33, a social media advisor from Colorado who will be going by the 'ballroom name' Muskrat Susie for the week. “It’s next to that pillar, so there’s some privacy, and there’s two outlets we can charge off of.”

“And it’s close enough to the café that we can steal their free Wi-Fi,” added her boyfriend, part-time social media counselor Mark Shin, who was clad in a pink thong and Viking helmet.

“There’s free Wi-Fi?! God, why don’t they do Burning Man here every year?”

The Sagebrush Ballroom has a posted occupancy limit of 275 persons. At press time, county fire marshal Jim Martinez had announced that supervised groups of 260 Burners will be allowed into the ballroom at regular intervals to have transcendent, life-altering experiences for up to ten minutes at a time. 

Winning One

As I got home from work Tuesday before last, I pulled out my phone and found that I had two new messages. The first was a text from a girl I’d been on a couple of dates with, in which she explained that although I was a – and this is a direct quote – “really great guy”, I wasn’t the sort of great guy she wanted to go out with. The second was an email from the Nicholl Fellowship, in which they said that although they wished me – and this is a direct quote – “the best of luck”, my script did not make it to the semifinal round.

As a sort of defense mechanism I try to assume that the worst possible thing will happen to me in every situation, so that no matter how it shakes out I either get to be pleasantly surprised or right about everything. I knew my script wasn’t going to win, but I was really hoping against hope to get to the semifinal round, where my script would have the chance to be read and rejected by the same people who vote for Best Original Screenplay every year. It’s a bummer that that didn’t happen, but being a quarterfinalist is still a good professional credential and I’ll get a bunch of unbiased feedback from the reader comments.

Still, I wasn’t going to squander a perfectly good opportunity to get drunk and absorb my friends’ sympathy. The next morning, suffering from a hangover and a severe case of self pity, I called in sick to work and spent the day watching Seinfeld, eating burritos, and thinking deep thoughts about my career. It was that night when the real trouble started.

I had just finished the Seinfeld episode where Elaine leaves a dirty message on Jerry’s tape recorder and George falls in love with her while trying an experimental Chinese baldness cream. As I cued up the next episode, parts of my MacBook Pro’s screen started flickering red, and moments later the whole machine went into kernel panic, which is Apple’s hipster answer to the Blue Screen of Death. I knew that this was a good indicator that my computer’s motherboard was fried, because when this same thing happened two months ago, that was what the guy at the Apple Genius Bar told me was going on – just before he replaced my computer’s motherboard with a brand new one, which had just now bit the dust.

I’ve never had good luck with my MacBook Pros. Software bugs and catastrophic hardware failures have become something of an annual tradition – about this time I every year I can usually count on spending at least a few hours on hold with AppleCare customer support, listening to their scratchy Top 40 hold music. Only last year I’d had to buy a whole new MacBook Pro because updating the operating system on my old one had more or less turned it into Jack Nicholson at the end of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. And now that year-old MacBook Pro had just broken two motherboards in as many months.

If you watch A Christmas Story as often as my family does, you’ll remember the scene where the aging furnace in Ralphie’s house goes on the fritz again, belching black smoke through the heat register. Used to this, Ralphie’s Dad angrily grabs his toolbox and runs down into the basement to fix it, and then all you can hear is profanity and metal clanging against metal. That’s more or less become my troubleshooting routine for my MacBooks – swearing, restarting, more swearing, Googling for tips, angry tirades about how Apple are a bunch of fucking money grubbing crooks, scheduling a Genius Bar appointment, declaring to whoever’s listening that I’m going to fucking buy a fucking PC so I quit giving these fucking pricks my fucking money, and so on. It’s exhausting for everyone – myself included – and it always ends with my MacBook held together with just enough spit and baling wire to get it to its next crash a few months down the road.  

This would frustrating enough on its own, but coming within 24 hours of an unwanted ego smackdown from the Nicholl Fellowship was a little too much for me to take. I scheduled a Genius Bar appointment and then started pricing out Dell ultrabooks online, planning the speech I’d make to the Apple Genius when he told me my MacBook would need its guts replaced yet again:

“No, you know what? Keep your crappy motherboard! You call this machine a MacBook Pro, but as a professional I haven’t got the time to keep dealing with this applesauce! Dude, I’m getting a Dell!”

“Noooo!” The Genius wails. “Not our competitors! And how clever to use their slogan from ten years ago!”

“You’re damn right it’s clever! I’m a clever guy!”

Petty? Yes. But after the week I’d been having I really needed to feel like I was winning at something.

On Thursday I made the familiar pilgrimage to the Apple Store in Sherman Oaks. My Genius looked like Central Casting’s answer to a stereotypical Apple Store employee: A white guy about my age with a mustache waxed to fine points on either side of his face. He listened with concern to my problems, checked a few of my computer’s settings, then took it into the back room to run some more tests.

When he swept back out of the room a few minutes later I was all ready for him to glibly tell me they were going to swap a third motherboard into my computer for it to destroy. I was going to indignantly yell “Just keep it! Sell it to buy more mustache wax!” and storm out of the store, when he said –

“Just give me a second. I’m going to talk to my manager about getting you a new computer.”

Minutes later he was back with a new MacBook and his manager, who explained that since my old computer clearly had baked-in hardware issues it would just be cheaper to exchange it for an identical replacement. My mustachioed Genius was opening the box to give me my new computer when his manager, processing my receipt on his phone, held up his hand.

“Hang on. Looks like we dropped the price of this MacBook by $200 after you bought your old one.”

He and the Genius looked at each other, then back to me.

“Alright, we’ll throw in a set of Beats headphones. What color do you want?”

All told, I’d much rather be a Nicholl Fellowship semifinalist with a broken computer and some shitty ear buds. But I'm finding that all this new free stuff is doing a great job of taking the edge off my disappointment. 

Bumfights

Just because I’m not into pro football or UFC doesn’t mean I don’t get a kick out of watching millionaires beating the crap out of each other on TV. And just because I snobbishly look down my nose at reality television doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a panel of sassy judges stirring the pot to make contestants snap at each other. Thursday night’s debate between Republican presidential candidates was a catty, bitter, largely substance-free street fight between ten men desperately trying to land more Twitter-worthy, attention grabbing zingers than the others. It was exactly the sort of debate America deserves and I loved every minute of it.

The 2010 Citizens’ United ruling, which amended most of our campaign finance laws to read “MAKE IT RAIIIIN, BITCH!”, has upended the traditional primary process. Whereas candidates used to have to build consensus and woo party chairmen to stay in the race, now pretty much anybody who’s chummy with a billionaire or two can be a serious contender for the party’s nomination. This unruly new order was on full display for the first time Thursday night, when ten men, each representing a different cabal of wealthy people’s favorite flavor of conservatism, went head to head in what could have been the XFL’s take on a college debate tournament.

Moderators Megyn Kelly, Bret Baier, and Chris Wallace set the tone for the evening, proving that they're all talented and capable journalists who simply choose to forego all semblance of integrity in their day to day jobs on Fox News. Between detailed, rapidly fired policy questions, the moderators prodded the candidates to squabble amongst themselves and relayed comments from the Internet asking about important issues, such as how often everyone received messages from God.

Rand Paul came out of the gates swinging, probably because it’s aggravating when your grassroots, upstart campaign with all its innovative policies and minority outreach has to resort to releasing videos of you chainsawing stacks of paper to stay relevant. Between abysmal fundraising, infighting, and a few indictments, Paul’s campaign is going down in flames, and onstage he apparently decided to at least try to steer the burning wreckage toward Chris Christie to take him down too. In one of the debate’s most Oh snap! moments, Paul and Christie came within sweaty, blustery inches of a full on slap fight over the PATRIOT Act and the relative merits of hugging President Obama versus hugging the families of 9/11 victims.

For his part, when moderators pressed Chris Christie on the fact that New Jersey is 44th nationally in job growth, his out of the can response was, “You shoulda seen it when I got there!” Which is a snappy line, but it would probably land a little better if there were more than 50 states. Moving your state from absolute bottom of the pack to slightly less than the absolute bottom of the pack isn’t the most compelling success story.

When Marco Rubio starts talking he gets this look in his eyes like the crazy guy in Full Metal Jacket. His piercing, seemingly all-seeing gaze never changes, whether he’s talking about making the GOP the party of the future or strongly denying that he’s ever wanted rape victims to be able to have abortions.

Jeb Bush’s most memorable line was, “In Florida, they call me Jeb,” which is also what we call him in California, probably because that’s what his campaign logo shouts at you. Neurosurgeon Ben Carson’s debate prep apparently consisted of coming up with as many brain-related one-liners as possible and then steering every answer toward them at all costs. Mike Huckabee got a lot of good promo footage for the Fox News show he’s going to start hosting in early 2017. Scott Walker rides a Harley. Ted Cruz wants us all to remember what it was like when Ted Cruz was the craziest person running for president.

Ohio governor John Kasich spoke eloquently about how his Christian faith compelled him to accept the Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling and expand the state’s Medicaid program to help the poor, and the crowd went wild. The moments when Kasich talked were virtually the only bullshit-free moments of the night – the guy comes off as an intelligent, moderate, compassionate conservative. The fact that a Republican presidential candidate could get huge applause for defending his decision to expand part of Obamacare would have been the big story from Thursday’s debate – were it not for Donald Trump.

Trump won the debate. Trump will win every debate he participates in. In a time of extreme voter apathy, a record 24 million people tuned in to watch a bunch of men on a stage arguing about politics because Trump was one of them. That means 24 million people saw him tell moderators that he would not rule out a third-party run if he doesn’t get the nomination. 24 million people saw him make a crack about Rosie O’Donnell being a fat slobbish animal, to cheers and laughter from the crowd. 24 million people saw him claiming the Mexican government is purposefully sending the dregs of their society to undermine America.

I wish I could not write about Trump, because there’s so many other candidates with so many other qualities to make fun of. But until he leaves the race it’s impossible not to write about him, because he is the race – and if he makes good on his threat to run as a third party candidate, he can effectively end the race for whoever the GOP nominee is.

It’s probably a bad sign that our political process can be so easily hijacked by a foul-mouthed two-time Wrestlemania host. But the way I see it, if this is what it takes to get tens of millions of people engaged in politics again, it was all worth it. 

Nicholls And Quarters

I’ve picked up a new hobby since last week, when I was notified that my screenplay is a quarterfinalist for the Nicholl Fellowship. That hobby is Googling questions about the Nicholl Fellowship – more specifically, questions about Nicholl Fellowship quarterfinalists. Long, detailed search queries like “nicholl fellowship quarterfinalists how many are famous now” or “nicholl fellowship quarterfinalist is it prestigious enough that you should tell your college alumni magazine even though you don’t subscribe” have taken me on a tour of pretty much every rinky-dink screenwriting website on the Internet that’s done a post on the Nicholl. I guess some part of me thinks that on page 9 of Google search results I’ll find a post from some obscure writing tutorial blog that will tell me exactly what I want to hear:

“…due to the overwhelming prestige of the Nicholl Fellowship, many thousands enter, but only the most elite writers are selected to continue competing as quarterfinalists. If you decide to enter the Nicholl and become a quarterfinalist, good news! Your quest for fame and fortune in Hollywood is officially on autopilot from now on. In fact, in a recent poll of Truman Capps’ favorite screenwriters, directors, and showrunners, all agreed that there is no greater indicator that a writer is an unparalleled creative genius than being selected as a Nicholl Fellowship quarterfinalist.”

Instead most of what I’m finding are posts older than some of my friends’ children on previous quarterfinalists’ long-abandoned personal blogs, where they announce that they’ve made the quarterfinals and then humorously detail the hours they've spent Googling questions about Nicholl quarterfinalists. Writing this, I realize that I’m now part of a natural phenomenon far bigger than just me and my script: An annual, communal mass ego stroking session that occurs among screenwriters late every summer, like hundreds of neurotic swallows with low self esteem returning to Capistrano.

So, to the subsequent Nicholl Fellowship quarterfinalists who stumble on my blog in the years to come, searching for some tidbit of reassuring information: Sorry, but I don’t have any clues to help you gauge whether you’ll make it to semis or not. How’s the future going, though? How are the new Star Wars movies? What about ISIS – are they still a thing?

Out of 7,442 scripts entered, mine was one of 375 to make it to the quarterfinal round. Every time I think about that, I go on a roller coaster ride between extreme arrogance and crippling pessimism and self doubt.

First, looking at the sheer number of people who didn’t make quarterfinals, I feel really, really good, and my inner monologue starts to sound like a Donald Trump campaign speech.

“Yeah, that’s right – I beat over seven thousand people at something! Have you ever beaten seven thousand people at something? I didn’t think so. Even Michael Jordan never beat seven thousand people! Well, in his lifetime, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe not. Me, I like people who did beat seven thousand people.”

But then, I start to think about how many people 375 really is. Once, at a college bowl game, Oregon played against a school with a 350-piece marching band. It took half an hour for all of them to file into a room; they traveled on a fleet of eight motor coaches. I picture that amount of people receiving the same quarterfinalist email that I did and suddenly I feel a lot less unique and special.

With that in mind, my inner monologue starts to sound more like Rust Cohle from the good season of True Detective. “Think you’re such hot shit, huh, smartass? Lying to yourself. You’ve read for screenplay competitions before. You already know the Dark Truth, but I’ll spell it out for you just the same: Most screenplays are garbage, man. You want to throw yourself a Sweet Sixteen for beating a bunch of misspelled adolescent vampire love stories and fratty The Hangover ripoffs? Be my guest. But all you’re celebrating is that you’re good enough to not be bad, and lucky enough to not be one of the good scripts that get snubbed in the first round.”

I don’t even turn on the radio in the car anymore. I just sit there in traffic listening to these two voices in my head going back and forth until I get to the office. And then I go inside, sit down at my desk, and listen to them for most of the day.  

It’s a month until I find out if I made it to the semifinals, which is an awfully long time to spend feeling my ego expand and contract every few seconds. So I keep going online and Googling questions about the fellowship because I want to find something that’ll help me gauge whether this experience is just a fluke in a contest known for flukes (one year's quarter and semifinalists frequently fail to even make it out of the first round the following year) or the beginning of something bigger.

I know my script is good, but I also know every single thing that’s wrong with it. Sifting through archived screenwriting message boards late at night, I guess I’m just looking for some kind of sign that either the judges won’t notice my script’s weaknesses, or that all the other scripts have way, way more weaknesses than mine. 

Trumped Up

I’m extremely supportive of Donald Trump. I’m really happy that he’s saying what he’s saying, and I sincerely hope he never apologizes for any of it. If anything, I hope he applies his blunt rhetorical abilities to lots of other issues. This is a free country – Donald Trump should be able to say whatever he wants about anything, such as women’s reproductive rights or the Confederate flag, preferably while standing in front of a huge banner with the Republican Party’s logo on it.

If you took the comments section beneath a Fox News article, gave it a lumpy, orange body with fake hair, and then brought it to life, you'd have Donald Trump. He's the end result of 30 years of conservative orthodoxy that has come increasingly unmoored from reality over the past few election cycles. The pipe dream of trickle down economics and all of its glowing, fetishy deference to rich people gave us a billionaire candidate who says he’s qualified to run the free world because he’s rich. Obsession with confrontational, ideologically pure candidates gave us a reality TV star who rode a Rain Man escalator into his new identity as presidential candidate. A tradition of pandering to the loudest, meanest segments of the Republican Party gave us a proud racist who thinks the president isn’t American.

The Donald is a Frankenstein monster made out of everything that’s gone wrong with our political system (and entertainment industry) over the past few years, and right now he’s polling higher than most other Republicans in the race. It’s not going to last, of course, but by the time he finds a self-important excuse to stop running for president, he will have made the Republican Party’s brand look about as bad as Jared Fogle’s does right now.

And that’s why I love Donald Trump.

The tricky thing about democracy is that the system tends to reward candidates who most of the people in the country like, and the country as a whole hates Donald Trump more than anybody who’s run for president in the past 35 years. Democrats hate him. Independents hate him. Nearly two thirds of Republicans hate him. Politics aside, most people don’t think that a guy with his own line of custom fragrances should be given the authority to launch nuclear missiles.

The other tricky thing is that we have so many Latino voters in this country now that it’s pretty difficult to become president unless a lot of them vote for you. And regardless of what you think about illegal immigrants, most Latinos don’t think they’re a rampaging horde of murdering rapists. (For what it’s worth, the facts back that up, too.) What I’m hoping happens, and what a lot of Republican donors hope doesn’t happen, is that even after Trump is gone his fragrance will linger. No matter who the Republican candidate winds up being, millions of absolutely crucial Latino voters in swing states will just see him as the latest offering from the party where a racist beauty pageant tycoon was able to thrive. It doesn’t help that it took most of the candidates – including Jeb Bush, whose wife and kids are Mexican-American – a couple of weeks to get around to calling out Trump’s racism.

What’s more, whoever winds up getting the nomination is going to have an immigration policy that is still pretty damn similar to the sort of thing Trump wants. Most of the candidates ultimately just want to put more guards on the border and leave it at that; Bush wants to overhaul the legal immigration system but doesn’t want a way for the 11 million illegals who already have lives here to become citizens. So about the best thing the eventual Republican candidate can say to distance himself from Trump is, “I’m going to do most of the things he wants to do to keep you people from coming to this country, but I’m going to be a lot more polite about it – and that’s a promise!”

Donald Trump’s big appeal to his supporters is that unlike some wishy washy career politician, he’s not afraid to speak the truth. And all the racist, xenophobic, demonstrably false garbage he’s spraying is the truth behind the GOP’s anti-immigration policies; it’s just not dressed up with safe, focus-tested language politicians use like ‘self deportation’ or ‘amnesty.’ Foreigners are overrunning our country, taking our jobs, and raping our women. Vote for me if you want to live. Every Republican candidate is selling some version of that message; Trump is just selling it straight. 

Wazed And Confused

Recently I started a new job at a major corporation where I write product descriptions to be printed on packaging for wireless routers, just like I'd once dreamed I would as a little boy. After years working at small ad agencies I’ve been surprised at how much I’m enjoying the corporate life in spite of my distaste for corporations in general. Everything is new, clean, and meticulously organized, everybody’s friendly but also restrained enough that we don’t get on each other’s nerves, and my desk is steps away from a company-subsidized cafeteria that will sell me an all natural grass-fed beef cheeseburger for $3.05. If I knew I could get working conditions like these I’d probably be down to sign up for a job on the Death Star. (Depending on their 401k situation.)

The one drawback is that my office is about 20 miles away from my apartment – 20 miles of the worst traffic congestion you’ve seen in your life, unless maybe you’re from India. Trying to drive anywhere in LA from 8 to 11 AM and 4 to 7 PM is like trying to get your car out of a stadium parking lot after a football game. Except after a football game, eventually the crush of cars disperses – in LA, one traffic jam just bleeds into the next from your point of origin to your destination. Every morning it takes me a good 45 minutes to get to the office. Coming home in the evening takes nearly an hour and a half on a bad day.

A few years from now this sort of thing won’t be such a big deal. After work everybody’s just going to hop into their self driving cars, crack open a beer, and noodle around on their phones as their AI drivers inch through packed freeways. But by the time that’s a reality I will have spent the equivalent of months hunched over my steering wheel staring at brake lights.

It eats me up thinking about all the time I’m wasting sitting in my car, even if I’d just fritter that time away on the Internet anyway. Hoping to outsmart traffic, I downloaded Waze, because their slogan has Outsmart traffic in it and because I was looking for some real-time crowdsourced shortcuts to speed up my commute. There’s tens of thousands of drivers in LA contributing traffic information to Waze, and I figured between all of them we might be able to figure out a way for me to get home in less than an hour.

Right away I got the sense that Waze was hard at work, because each day it took me on a different journey to and from the office. Every time it told me to jump off the freeway and then get back on a few blocks later, or sent me down a sidestreet through a dodgy neighborhood, I’d smile smugly to myself, thinking of the horrible traffic disasters I was skirting. “Ha-HA! I’m going to get there SO much faster! Suck on my big data, losers!”

But after a week or two the novelty started to wear off when I noticed that these time saving detours, while a great way to see a lot of cool, off the beaten path pockets of town, weren’t really saving me any time. One day I let Waze guide me home by way of various surface streets, leafy residential avenues, and a series of increasingly narrow and potholed roads winding up through the Hollywood Hills. The following day I ditched Waze and got on the gridlocked freeway instead, only for it to take me the same amount of time to get home as it had the day before.

I think that Waze really genuinely believes that it’s helping. If the app calculates that it can save me 16 seconds by having me cut through a neighborhood for one block, it’ll do it – even if that means right after I have to spend five minutes at a stop sign trying to make a left turn onto a busy street. Maybe, by the end of the trip, Waze’s various detours will have shaved four minutes off what my commute would have been otherwise. The amount of research, development, and technological wizardry that went into saving me that four minutes is impressive, but on some days it takes me ten minutes to find a parking space so that accomplishment is kind of lost.

I had expected Waze to be like driving around with a super efficient robot hivemind navigator. It wound up feeling a lot more like I was being guided by some kind of klutzy Zooey Deschanel type, sending me on eccentric little shortcuts that save me no time but teach me important lessons about how life is really about the journey.

What I’ve come to realize is that tens of thousands of drivers aren’t just contributing information to Waze – they’re making use of that information too. So the second somebody finds a low-traffic route it gets swarmed by other Wazers until it’s not low traffic anymore. I think the app could be greatly improved if everybody was allowed to contribute traffic information but I was the only one who was allowed to receive it.

Until they release that patch, though, I’ve given up on trying outsmart traffic. It can’t be done. Every other person on the road is trying to figure out the fastest way to get home too – it’s not like there’s some magic, commute-halving shortcut that everybody else just happened to miss. Trying to outsmart rush hour traffic in LA is like trying to outsmart the ocean while you’re drowning in it.​

Other Noteworthy Scalia Dissents

MCCORMACK V. CITY OF BOMANT, ILLINOIS (1984)

“…What the plaintiff fails to address, in all his ever-so-earnest hocus-pocus about David’s supposed “leaping and dancing before the Lord”, is that this case was never about whether certain Biblical figures engaged in physical contortions and rhythmic movements that could be construed as ‘dancing.’ Such rhetorical applesauce is simply a distraction, a carnival freakshow intended to turn us away from the central question of this case. So I’ll ask it again: Who are we, as a panel of unelected judges, to say that the people of Bomant are not allowed to ban dancing if they so choose?

What’s so special about dancing, anyway? The Constitution states that we are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – the framers make no mention of dancing. Even a child could tell you that happiness and dancing do not go hand in hand – personally, some of my happiest moments have occurred while sitting completely still. Yet my colleagues on the bench have been bamboozled into upending the democratic process to overturn a popular and effective law, unfairly silencing the good and just people of Bomant who sought to ban dancing for the safety of the town’s young people – many of whom are engaged in a wild and reckless dance montage even as we speak.”

BUDDY THE DOG V. WASHINGTON INTERSCHOLASTIC ACTIVITIES ASSOCIATION (1997)

“…I’ve seen a great deal of applesauce in my many years on this bench, but never before have I beheld as much applesauce in a single case as I have here today. I am a dog lover, to be sure, but unlike my colleagues I am actually capable of putting my affection for canines aside long enough to make a clear-eyed assessment of the facts. And the facts are these: Simply because the WIAA’s bylaws do not explicitly prohibit dogs from playing basketball, they do not also allow just any stray dog, no matter how cute, to join in a state-sanctioned regular season basketball game.

Just because Buddy can play basketball doesn’t mean he should be allowed to play basketball. Doing so makes a mockery of the sport! When the rules of the game were written it was clear they were intended to be applied to two teams of human players; redefining them now after over a hundred years sets an ominous precedent. If a dog can play basketball, then what’s to stop a dog from playing football, or soccer, or baseball?”

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY V. GHOSTBUSTERS (1984)

“…I should like to take this opportunity to commend Mr. Peck’s work. He is an exemplary public servant, one who put the lives of millions of New Yorkers ahead of his own when he courageously shut down the dangerous, unregistered, and unlawful containment unit being operated by Drs. Spengler, Stantz, and Venkman. It’s beyond my comprehension how anyone could look at the facts of this case and blame Mr. Peck for the subsequent incident with the Stay-Puft Marshmellow Man.

By siding with the defendants, this court overrules hundreds of years of legal history and silences tens of millions of good, honest, hardworking Americans who have well-founded personal and cultural objections to the practice of ghostbusting. In times of paranormal razzmatazz, people should be free to take whatever course of action they so choose – but this ruling, which reeks of applesauce, all but forces them to call Ghostbusters.”

BUELLER V. ROONEY (1986)

“…If any of Mr. Rooney’s actions at the plaintiff’s house that day overstepped his bounds as dean of students, he was only doing so in the interests of ensuring Mr. Bueller got an education. Indeed, I should think most high schoolers would be lucky to have a man like Ed Rooney in their lives – if they did, maybe this country wouldn’t be resting on the precipice of destruction. By ruling to award the plaintiff his diploma in spite of his repeated and flagrant violations of the school’s attendance policy, this court is effectively encouraging teens everywhere to engage in the same careless, dangerous ballyhoo as Mr. Bueller – skipping school, stealing cars, unlawfully trespassing on parade floats…

Already, testimony shows that many of Mr. Bueller’s classmates consider him a ‘righteous dude.’ This decision only further tightens his viselike grip on today’s impressionable youth. Mr. Bueller is a ‘bad seed’ – to borrow a phrase from Mr. Rooney – and with today’s action the court ensures that his bad seed will grow into a bad apple, which, in due course, will become bad applesauce.”

BAMBI V. HUNTER (1942)

“…am I the only one on this court who’s stopped to wonder what, exactly, Bambi’s mother was doing wandering around in the open during hunting season?”​ 

Metro

Recently I was walking down the platform in my local Metro station when I heard a weird splashing sound to my left. Turning to look, I saw a man with his back to me, on tiptoes facing one of the little metal wall-mounted trash cans, his hands out of sight and liquid splattering off the edge of the wastebasket onto the floor. Basic human self preservation kicked in and I snapped my eyes forward without breaking stride. And then I thought, Wait a second. It’s 11:30 AM on a Sunday. There’s other people on the platform. That guy had a good haircut and trendy sunglasses. I bet he was emptying out a water bottle and I just looked from the wrong angle at the wrong time. And figuring this would be a funny anecdote I could tell to friends or maybe work into a blog sometime, I looked over my shoulder at him to confirm what I was thinking –

And found myself taking a second look at a man who was very clearly taking a torrential piss into a subway station garbage can on a Sunday morning. I’ve been trying pretty hard to forget that sight ever since, but what sticks out in my mind was the guy’s attitude. He wasn’t slumping his shoulders or looking around to see if people were watching. He wasn’t using one of the more isolated and private garbage cans at the far ends of the platform. He seemed so confident about what he was doing that I almost felt like I was the weird one for trying to catch a train in his bathroom.

It took me some time to process that experience, and at first I came away thinking, Well, that’s why more people don’t ride public transit. But then it occurred to me that that was far and away the most disgusting thing I’d seen in three years of regularly riding LA’s subways – and really, by public transit standards, that’s not so bad.

Look, forgive me for being crude, but considering all of the things that man could have been doing with his penis out in public, using it to urinate into a container explicitly intended to hold waste was one of the most agreeable options. I’m sure I speak for everyone on the platform that day when I say that I would’ve rather he not been doing anything with his penis, but I don’t know his situation so I’m not going to judge.

I think the Metro staff are with me on this one. The stations are automated, but offsite security guards monitor camera feeds and when necessary will issue stern reprimands to passengers through a booming intercom, like a god who’s really a stickler for fire codes. “Attention Metro passengers, please do not sit on the stairs… Metro passengers, please do not sit on the stairs… Man with the red backpack and Dodgers cap, I’m talking to you… Thank you.” But the loudspeakers were conspicuously silent during this guy’s bathroom break.

I guess I can’t blame whatever guard was on camera duty that day – I mean, what can you really say to somebody who’s going to the bathroom in front of a crowd of people? I guess you can ask him to stop, but I feel like at that point his mind is already made up.

Besides that incident, though, nuisances on the Metro are pretty low key – people crowding the doors, some fragrant homeless people, and the occasional guy walking up and down the car doing an intense, extended freestyle rap while making eye contact with as many other passengers as possible. Just the other day, a bunch of teenagers got on with a boom box blasting hip hop. Some guy yelled at them to turn it down, they did, the guy thanked them, and they apologized. Compare that to the scene in Predator 2, where LA’s Metro is apparently so dangerous that every single rider carries a gun – which proves to be useful when the Predator attacks the train car and kills a bunch of people, another thing that’s never happened to me.

I think LA’s Metro is so relatively non-fucked up because it was only built in the early 1990s – unlike New York City we haven’t had a century to build a rich culture of people coming up with creative new ways to deface the subway. Buses are a different story entirely, but by and large people below ground manage to get from point A to point B without vandalizing anything. Maybe the subway just doesn’t go to the neighborhood where all the assholes live? Either that or the knowledge that the Metro has killed about 100 people in under 30 years keeps everybody on their best behavior. 

I guess if I have to see a guy pissing in a garbage can every so often in order to ride an otherwise cleanish and quietish train, it’s worth it. I mean, virtually every square inch of public space in any city has been peed on by someone at some point; you just don’t really find yourself thinking about it that much until you see it happening. 

The Nicholl

I started writing a screenplay last October, which, in terms of time commitment, sanity lost, and showers skipped, is sort of the nonathletic homebody's answer to hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. I also had a job at the time, and just motivating myself to do something constructive after a day at the office was an ordeal in and of itself. It’s like if in Wild Reese Witherspoon was still working 40 or 50 hours a week and just trying to hike the entirety of the West Coast between 6:30 and 11:30 every night. How far do you think she’d get at that rate? “I know I have to ford that river and climb that mountain tonight, but after that accounts meeting all I want to do is crack a beer in my sweatpants and watch Top Chef.”

By late January I hadn’t made much progress, but then I was lucky enough to get laid off from my job at the end of the month. Freed from time consuming obligations like leaving my apartment and supported by a series of generous grants from California’s unemployment insurance program, I started working 60-70 hour weeks on my script, completed three drafts over the next three months, and entered it into the Nicholl Fellowship about ten hours ahead of the deadline on May 1st.

In terms of prestige, competitiveness, and number of dreams shattered annually, the Nicholl Fellowship is sort of the amateur screenwriter’s answer to The X Factor. During its open entry period the Fellowship, run by the Academy of Motion Picture etc, receives thousands of screenplays from all over the world – over 7500 of them last year. The Fellowship committee then musters an army of readers large enough so that every script can be read and rated on a scale of 1 to 100 by two different people. Out of this ocean of submitted screenplays, the scripts with the highest scores (usually about 10% of the whole) are selected to be read by a third person. Then, the scripts with the highest two cumulative scores are chosen to advance to the quarterfinal round.

Last year, out of 7500 scripts submitted, 900 got a third read, and 377 advanced to quarterfinals. Quarterfinal scripts get read by two more readers, and those with the highest average scores move on to the semifinal round, where they’re read by members of the Academy – some of whom are Academy Award nominees or recipients. Last year 148 scripts made it to semifinals. The ten highest scoring scripts are selected for the final round. Then, five writers are chosen as Nicholl Fellows, given $35,000 apiece, and showered with praise, glory, and phone calls from studio executives.

You know, actually, forget the X Factor part – it’s more like The Hunger Games of creativity.

For a script to make it to the final round, at least eight different people have to read it and really enjoy it. When was the last time you talked to eight people who all agreed that a particular movie had been amazing? (People who just walked out of the Entourage movie don’t count.)

And at least the Hunger Games were a purely objective competition: It’s easy to identify the last two non-dead kids in a given area. Expressing your opinion of something as large and complex as a screenplay with a single number is a lot more subjective, especially in a competition where a single point can determine whether a script progresses to the next round. The screenplay for Little Miss Sunshine, which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, didn’t even break to the quarterfinals of the Nicholl.

My screenplay is the best thing I’ve ever written, the foremost representation of my abilities as a writer up until this point, and I would bet $1000 that I won’t make it to the final round. Not only am I competing against great writers from all over the (English speaking) world, I’m doing so in a competition where a single grumpy judge rating my script 81 instead of 82 can mean the end of everything. It’s equal parts skill, blind luck, and divine intervention.

Actually, forget the Hunger Games analogy. You know the first scene in Saving Private Ryan, where the soldiers are landing on the beach and the Nazis are just mowing them down with machine guns and mortars? That’s the Nicholl Fellowship.

The upshot to this competition being such a meat grinder is that making even one of the cuts can still be a boon to your writing career. After the Fellows have been named in November, the competition circulates lists of the quarter, semi, and finalists to studios and industry professionals. Word is that a lot of quarterfinalists and all semifinalists wind up getting phone calls from agents, meetings at production companies, and other interest from people whose attention I’ve been trying to get for years.

I’ve decided I want to be a semifinalist, a goal that still feels overly optimistic, given everything I’m up against. On August 1st I’ll find out whether my script has made it far enough up the beach to be a quarterfinalist. And even if that’s as far as it goes, I’ll still be pleased. I mean, my script doesn’t have to be Tom Hanks. I just don’t want it to be the guy who gets shot in the face before he even gets off the boat. 

Higher Education

My 7th grade history teacher was an aging hippie named Mr. Dix. Why someone with such an unfortunate last name would walk into a building full of 13-year-olds every day is beyond me – a name like that is the middle school equivalent of covering yourself in fish guts and jumping into a shark tank. Whatever his reason, it definitely wasn’t a passion for education, as he made clear in numerous rants about his plans to retire at the end of the year and move back to the Midwest, never to teach again. In class every day, though, it seemed as though he’d decided to start his retirement a little early.

The way I remember it, the class curriculum was mostly worksheets and several old videotaped episodes of Ken Burns’ The Civil War, which Mr. Dix had recorded off the TV years ago, judging by the age of some of the commercials. One time the Sears air conditioner ad that got burned into every kid’s collective conscious in the 90s came on, which generated far more interest from the class than the previous segment about the Battle of Shiloh.

At the time, Mr. Dix wasn’t there to quiet the class down, because he had the odd habit of getting up and just strolling out of the classroom while we watched a video or did Xeroxed word searches about slavery. Most days we could count on being left to our own devices for anywhere from five minutes to half an hour.

He never explained where he was going or why, which left us to fill in the blanks on our own. With our teacher gone for half the class period and busywork assignments that didn’t always seem to get graded, we had plenty of time to speculate. The class was pretty well divided between two schools of thought: There were those who believed Mr. Dix had some sort of amusing bowel condition, but most of the class had settled on the more plausible answer, which was that he and various other male staff members were off someplace having gay sex.

After all, the reasoning went, his last name is Dix.

But as the year went on, we began to spot Mr. Dix wandering around the campus during class time. We’d see him meandering through the halls while we were out on hall passes, and one kid in another period said that after one of Mr. Dix’s disappearing acts he noticed him through the window, walking across the athletic fields toward a wooded area at the edge of campus.

If he wasn’t having explosive diarrhea or in a utility closet with the security guard and the assistant principal, then what else could he be doing when he went out on walkabout? Most of the class united behind a new answer: Every day he was leaving his classes to go smoke pot.

To me, this seemed even less believable than the gay sex explanation. (I had always been a member of the diarrhea camp.) We debated it while left unattended in class one day, the TV volume turned down so we wouldn’t have to listen to David McCullough read excerpts from Abraham Lincoln’s war diary.

“It doesn’t make sense.” I said. “Why would he smoke pot at school?”

“Because he’s a pothead, dude!”

“But if they catch him smoking pot at school, he could lose his job and get arrested! Why wouldn’t he just wait to do it at home?”

“Because he loves the chronic too much! That’s why his eyes are always red when he comes back, and he’s all absent minded and stuff!”

The kid had a point – when he was actually teaching his class, Mr. Dix’s lessons had a tendency to meander. Stories about Robert E. Lee’s battlefield prowess would often blend into rants about the Bush Administration or the superiority of free-range salmon. He was usually munching on chips or pretzels at his desk. Students who sucked up often found their grades propped up by mysterious extra credit points that appeared in Mr. Dix’s gradebook – I know this because I sucked up. But even with all this evidence, Mr. Dix being a stoner just seemed like too easy an assumption to be true.

“No. He’s a teacher. Maybe he’s not a good teacher, but he’s not just going to cut his own class to do drugs on school property and then teach high. The other teachers would notice! Or the DARE cop! Mr. Dix isn’t that stupid.”

“Yeah, you would say that, Truman! I bet you’re gonna go meet him out there in the field and suck his Dix!”

This was how most conversations in middle school ended – one party accusing the other of being gay. It was a simpler time.

At a party awhile ago I wound up talking to one of my friends who teaches high school history. She was holding her beer and her cigarette with the same hand and seemed about as excited for the end of the school year as Mr. Dix was.

“The kids don’t have any work ethic any more, and neither do I. Last night I decided to have a beer while I was grading papers, and then that turned into beers, and then it turned into surfing Instagram drunk.”

“God. I hear stuff like this and it makes me wonder if some of my teachers were really weird, or just hungover all the time,” I said, looking back on the more lethargic educators I’d had and trying to match their habits with symptoms of substance abuse.

She nodded rapidly. “Oh, yeah. Most of them probably were.” She finished her beer and leaned closer, lowering her voice. “Every semester there’s at least a couple kids in my class where I don’t read one of their papers. I just put in a B+ in the gradebook and call it good.”

“Well, now I kind of feel like an idiot for ever trying hard in school.”

She shrugged as if to say, Yeah, maybe you were.

“Oh, hey,” I said. “This is unrelated, but I think a few of us are going to smoke a joint in the backyard in a couple minutes, if you want in on that.”

Her eyes lit up. “Oh, yeah! Let me know when you’re going out there.”

The more I think about it, and the more public school teachers I meet socially, I realize that Mr. Dix probably was dipping out on his own class to smoke weed during the school day. He certainly wouldn’t be the first person to sneak out of a job they didn’t care about to get high – I’d say probably two thirds of the Blockbuster Video employees I’ve spoken to in my life were stoned at the time. Just because Mr. Dix had a teaching certificate didn’t make him any less likely to mentally check out of his job once he knew he was quitting. All he had to do was not get too baked to run the VCR.

One day Mr. Dix started the video of The Civil War where we’d left off last period, informed us there’d be a quiz in the last 20 minutes of class after the video ended, and then departed the room. As soon as the door closed, a kid jumped up and rewound the video we were watching all the way to the beginning. When he returned, Mr. Dix didn’t notice, and seemed genuinely confused when the bell rang and the video was still running.

This kid ran the same play over the next two class periods, and we wound up watching the segment about Andersonville Prison Camp three times until Mr. Dix caught on and started writing detentions. After that, he quit leaving us alone so much. We must’ve really harshed his buzz. 

Madness

I went and saw Avengers: Age of Ultron a couple weeks ago and came out of the theater surprised at just how much I’d enjoyed the movie. Sure, the ending dragged on too long, the plot took some incomprehensible twists, and the film was so jam-packed with product placements that at times it resembled an all-star infomercial, but I’d long since resigned myself to the knowledge that that sort of thing is just par for the course in a big budget action movie. Age of Ultron was a smart, fun ride in spite of numerous scenes so bad even Joss Whedon hated shooting them – that, I assumed, was the best you could hope for when you go to see a movie with a budget that exceeds the GDP of a small country.

And then I saw Mad Max: Fury Road, a movie that took me firmly by the balls, strapped me to the front of an apocalyptic hot rod monster truck, and gave me a nonstop 80 mile per hour reminder of exactly what an action movie is capable of. Afterward, I was less forgiving of Age of Ultron’s flaws. Why did we have to see Jeremy Renner’s dumb family? Why did they rely on CG instead of just building a fully functional Iron Man suit and flying that around a real levitating city? Why didn’t Age of Ultron have a dude wailing on a double necked electric flamethrower guitar while riding a hot rod made of amps?

Come to think of it, why doesn’t every movie have that? The Empire Strikes Back, Scarface, Shakespeare In Love – I can’t think of a single movie that wouldn’t be improved by the addition of high-speed speed metal.

Here’s the plot of Mad Max: Fury Road: Apocalyptic road warrior Charlize Theron betrays her mutant warlord boss and helps his harem of sex slaves escape in a huge armored 18-wheeler while he and his army of goons give chase. This all gets set up in about 20 minutes, freeing up the next 100 for car crashes, explosions, double crosses, acrobatics, near misses, sweet jumps, triple crosses, and numerous other literal and figurative twists and turns. This is not a dialog-heavy movie; with so much going on the characters really don’t have time to say much besides what’s necessary to survive that moment’s immediate life-or-death crisis. 

Director George Miller is well aware that nobody is buying a ticket to see a Mad Max movie because they think it’s a dialog-driven character study. When first conceiving the plot, Miller didn’t write a script – he created 3500 storyboards of the chase. Since the days of The General and Safety Last, people have been going to the movies because they want to see death defying spectacle. Fury Road is openly and unapologetically all about spectacle.

And the real genius of this spectacle-focused extravaganza is that it’s anything but a dumb action movie. It’s actually one of the smartest action movies I’ve ever seen. What little dialog there is is on point, but every character is so richly realized and expertly acted that, as Miller has stated, an audience in Japan could watch the movie with no subtitles and still keep up with the plot. Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, and Nicholas Hoult have all invested so deeply in their characters that they can convey pages' worth of dialog with a look or a gesture – their characters grow and evolve constantly throughout the script, and for the most part you’ll watch these changes play out on their faces rather than listen to them tell each other about it. And all of this nuanced character development is happening with an army of bloodthirsty psychotic mutants in souped-up war jalopies right on the protagonists’ tailpipe.

I absorbed all of this with a wide, uncontrollable grin plastered across my face. The audience I saw it with was the sort of audience that applauds after huge moments, but there’s so few breaks in the action in Fury Road that they only had one or two chances to catch their breath and clap before the movie ended. And afterwards, as we all stumbled out onto the quiet street full of normal, slow moving cars, I found myself wondering – why isn’t every action movie like this?

There’s a scene in Age of Ultron where Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow confesses to Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner that she’s unable to have children. And taken in a vacuum, the scene works, because Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo are great actors. But taken in the context of the larger movie, it’s hard to square this sensitive indie film moment with scenes where the Hulk destroys an entire African city or Black Widow snaps a lucky bad guy’s neck between her thighs.

Nobody outside a theater showing Age of Ultron is raving about the Black Widow/Hulk infertility conversation. No kid is reenacting that with his action figures. The movie’s focus is action – so why take a break for a scene like that? Is that really what your audience is paying to see?

I guess that’s not fair – Marvel movies have to check a lot of boxes in order to stay true to the comics and keep the fanbase from rioting in the streets. But in a perfect world, more movies would take a page from Fury Road’s book and trim out everything that isn’t actively enhancing the film’s action and momentum.

That’s not to say that action movies should shy away from emotional complexity. They just need to approach it differently – saying more with less, integrating it into the action, keeping things moving at all times. If that turns a 145-minute action movie into a breakneck two hours, I’d say that’s an improvement.

I never thought I’d be the one advocating for any genre of movie to get less talky and more blow-uppy. Maybe a couple weeks from now I’ll calm down a bit and take back everything I’ve said. Right now, though, my adrenaline is still pumping and I saw the movie eight days ago – I guess I just want every action movie to give me this kind of buzz. 

Jade Helm

Maybe by now you’ve heard of Jade Helm 15, which is either a major US military training exercise taking place across several Southwestern states, or the first wave of a clandestine takeover of states that didn’t vote for Obama, wherein martial law will be declared, guns confiscated (naturally), and Walmart stores cleverly repurposed as FEMA reeducation centers. I suppose Walmart was chosen because their everyday low prices make it cheaper to reeducate the populace there than at Target – and to think people say government spending is wasteful! 

The basis for these fears – besides the fact that the president is a black guy with a funny name – is a single leaked PowerPoint slide from a Pentagon presentation about the exercise, in which Texas and Utah are tinted red and labeled as hostile territories. The military has patiently explained that in wargames the bad guys are always the ‘Red Team’, and that Texas and Utah were chosen because it’s easier to pretend parts of the US are hostile than it is to hold major training exercises in Iran and North Korea for realism’s sake.

Pretty much the only people who don’t believe the military’s explanation are tinfoil hat-wearing right wing lunatics. The problem is that after several election cycles’ worth of voter suppression and low turnout, the state of Texas is now being run by tinfoil hat-wearing right wing lunatics.

Texas Senator John Cornyn wants his constituents to know he met with top Pentagon officials in Washington to get answers about Jade Helm. (“Tell me straight up, general: Are you going to invade Texas? Blink once for yes.”) Congressman Louie Gohmert has demanded that the military change their training map so that Texas is no longer listed as hostile, because the combat readiness of our armed forces is a secondary concern to ensuring that no Texans’ feelings are hurt.

And then there’s the crown jewel of paranoia pandering: Texas governor Greg Abbott has ordered the Texas State Guard to “monitor” the Jade Helm exercises to ensure that Texans’ “…safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed.” This means that Texas, the state that refuses to expand Medicaid to a million uninsured residents because of ‘fiscal conservatism’, is now spending taxpayer dollars so State Guard units can protect Texans from their own government’s military training exercise. 

I guess you can’t fault the governor for wanting to protect his citizens’ constitutional rights. Of course, a fair number of legal experts have made the argument that under the Constitution’s ‘Equal Protection’ clause all Americans have the right to marry whomever they please regardless of gender. I guess that’s not as pressing an issue as the government’s imminent invasion of a state that’s already home to 15 military bases and over 120,000 active duty servicemen and women.

Personally, I have a hard time taking any conspiracy theory seriously if FEMA is one of the fearsome, shadowy villains. In my experience, FEMA has a hard enough time distributing bottled water in the wake of natural disasters; I seriously doubt they’re up to the task of brainwashing millions of Texans to hate country music and love quinoa.

And with all due respect to the US military, I have an even harder time believing they’re capable of imposing a new social order across a vast territory populated by 25 million heavily armed people who don’t like the US government. That’s more or less what we tried to do in Iraq, and look how well that turned out.

Why is it that so many of the people who believe government is too bloated, corrupt, and inefficient to educate children or subsidize health insurance also believe that same government is capable of executing a lightning fast, extremely complex plot to enslave tens of millions of people under martial law? How is the government simultaneously incompetent and diabolical? Do the slow-witted thumb-twiddling bureaucrats with overinflated pensions run the government only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, while the Illuminati and anti-Christian socialists do Monday, Wednesday, and Friday? Who’s in charge on the weekends – militant homosexuals or lizard people?

All of this controversy and commotion has done nothing to stop Jade Helm – the exercise (or takeover) starts next month. About the only change is that now the whole operation will be keenly observed by a few bored Texas State Guard members with binoculars and a notepad looking for anything suspicious. Best case scenario, maybe they’ll pick up some of the training through osmosis and this whole thing won’t be a total waste. 

Beach Body Ready

Well, no, Protein World, since you ask, I’m not beach body ready. And that’s fine by me – I barely ever go to the beach, so the readiness of my beach body is about as important to me as the readiness of my Gathering of the Juggalos body. But why focus on the bodies that I don’t have ready? My apartment body is always ready. Same for my walking across the street to drop my unemployment application in the mailbox body, or my In-N-Out Burger drive thru body. 

I first heard about the fracas over Protein World’s allegedly body-shaming advertisements in London while listening to the radio in the car, so I had to wait until I got home to actually see what the advertisement that upset everyone looked like. And I have to be honest – when I saw it, I wasn’t sure if I was looking at the right ad, because nothing about it struck me as especially offensive.

Is the model in the ad unrealistically, probably unhealthily skinny? Yes! Does that contribute to negative body image issues? Yes! It’s definitely offensive, but I don’t find it any more offensive than any of the thousands of other advertisements and cultural messaging out there that says basically the same thing. I’m glad there’s been such a public backlash against the ad, but if I walked past it on the street it probably wouldn’t stand out to me from all the other advertisements promoting unattainable physiques.

A lot of the people lining up to defend Protein World are making the argument that that physique is attainable, and all you have to do to attain it is quit being a pussy, hit your maxes, redefine your impossible, smash some supersets, crank it up to tri-sets, don’t get tired get angry, and do cheat reps to achieve total muscle failure because nothing tastes as good as thin feels. This, like the ad, also didn’t strike me as out of the ordinary. You can usually count on a certain number of people who post lots of pictures of their sweaty abs on Instagram to be body shaming defenders, because for them it's a personal motivational tool.

No, what got my attention was when the tools who run Protein World took to Twitter to attack their critics. In response to a critical tweet from eating disorder survivor Juliette Burton, the company’s official Twitter account said, “We are a nation of sympathizers for fatties… Why make your insecurities our problem?” Later, Protein World CEO and human diarrhea fountain Arjun Seth used his personal account to defend the company by making light of Burton’s lifelong struggles with mental illness:

I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the people running a company that sells premium protein powders and nutritional supplements are a bunch of dicks. But in this day and age, when brands have whole social media teams dedicated to avoiding controversy and mitigating bad press, it’s unusual to see a company openly and proudly acting like the mean jock in an 80s teen movie.

A few days into the controversy, Protein World stands by its advertisements and has made no comment on their Twitter escapades. On Thursday Richard Staveley, Protein World’s head of global marketing, defended the company, saying “We have absolutely no intention of removing the adverts because of a minority making a lot of noise… It is a shame that in 2015 there are still a minority who aren’t focusing on celebrating those who aspire to be healthier, fitter, and stronger.”

Yes, Richard – it truly is a grave injustice that the world has yet to unite in recognition of people who post daily gym selfies for all of their contributions to society at large. While we blindly celebrate doctors and teachers and humanitarians there are countless men and women doing bench presses and leg lifts in obscurity. Step aside, income inequality! Failure to properly celebrate people who exercise frequently is the real shame of our generation.

Unfortunately, no matter how badly Protein World behaves it seems unlikely they’re going to suffer that much for it. Even though the United Kingdom’s advertising regulators have banned the beach body ad, the controversy has generated so much free international publicity that there’s been speculation that all of this was a calculated PR move to build Protein World’s brand.

Like millions of other people, I’d never heard of Protein World until their ad blew up. That’s because I, like millions (billions?) of others around the world, don’t use protein powders and dietary supplements to begin with. Now I hate Protein World, but that doesn’t really affect their bottom line because I wasn’t going to be a customer anyway. Same goes for most of Protein World’s critics on Twitter – people campaigning for the acceptance of all body types probably don’t spend a lot of money on specialized weight loss and workout shakes.

The market for protein powders is relatively small, pretty much limited to fitness enthusiasts looking for an edge in their workout, and there’s no shortage of supplement manufacturers competing for those customers. Right now, virtually every protein powder aficionado on Earth knows about Protein World. They’ve set themselves apart from the crowded field of competitors.

Of course, most people buying protein shakes and supplements are probably just as offended at Protein World’s antics as everybody else and will make a point of buying from their competitors. But among the elitist subset of the fitness community, the narrative of a supplement manufacturer refusing to back down in the face of persecution by radical feminazis and assorted other fatties is really compelling. These supporters represent the thousands of new Twitter followers Protein World has gained in the past few days. They’re responsible Protein World’s much-ballyhooed uptick in sales. Protein World doesn’t need to sell to everyone: They just need a lot of seriously loyal customers, and they’ve found them.

It’s beautiful, really: A company run by preening, elitist dicks, hocking specialty supplements to other preening, elitist dicks. You know, it really is a shame that more people aren't celebrating Protein World - they're in the process of creating the biggest circlejerk of all time. 

When In Drought

Earlier this month, Governor Brown issued an executive order for Californians to reduce water consumption by 25% across the board. This made big news, but I didn’t really give it that much attention. I mean, it’s very much a necessary step for our survival, and I'm going to comply as best I can. But just because it's a necessary step for our survival is no guarantee that Californians as a whole are actually going to take it. Best case scenario, I'm predicting a 25% increase in griping and finger pointing. 

There’s a Change.org petition protesting Brown’s order that's making the rounds on Twitter and Facebook, and it shows exactly what I mean. “STOP PUNISHING CALIFORNIA RESIDENTS!” whines the petition, addressed to the governor and legislature. “We have done our part. We have installed water saving toilets, showerheads, sprinklers, faucets, etc… Enough is enough! YOU have done nothing to prepare the state for water shortages... Time for YOU to get to work. Find ways to bring water to the state.” The petition goes on to helpfully list some solutions, the highlight being a “Waterpipe to Oregon/Washington States” to capture water from the Columbia River and bring it to California.

There’s so much to love about this stupid idea. The use of the term “waterpipe” in a non-marijuana related context, the author’s blind assumption that people in Oregon and Washington are just so fond of California that they’ll happily share the Columbia River… But what I love most is that when faced with an unprecedented drought of Biblical proportions, Californians think building a 900-mile interstate water pipeline is a better solution than watering their lawns only once a week.

The petition, by the way, has picked up about 60,000 signatures in ten days.

I know the drought is serious, but it doesn’t feel serious. Part of that is probably because I moved here right about the time the drought began, from a state where it rained constantly for most of the year. When LA would go for six or seven months between rainstorms, I just assumed that was what life was like everywhere outside of Oregon.

It also helps that all the really scary drought stuff isn’t happening in LA, a city that only exists because of fierce and unscrupulous acquisition of water rights. Lawns here are green. People wash their cars. Business owners in Hollywood still hose bums’ piss off the sidewalks in front of their stores. About the only noticeable difference is that the Venice Canals have become a foul smelling mossy swamp surrounded by multimillion dollar beach houses.

Then I go onto bleak news sites like The Guardian or Vice, where I typically read depressing stories about catastrophes in other countries, and instead see full size pictures of towns a couple hundred miles north of me that would look more at home in a trailer for Mad Max: Fury Road.*

*Yes, I know Obama and his anger translator Luther did that joke at the White House Correspondents' Dinner last night, but I wrote the joke on Wednesday. Look, all I’m saying is, I am at least as funny as the president/the guy writing the president’s jokes. 

I’m living in the middle of a catastrophe, but I’m also living in the middle of a big concentration of money and voters, so it doesn’t feel so much like a catastrophe yet.

When people here talk about the drought, the conversation usually starts with an acknowledgment of how serious things are (“Did you see that thing on BuzzFeed with the before and after pictures of the reservoirs? We are so fucked.”) before moving on to why we all secretly feel like this whole mess isn't our fault: Almonds.

Yes, as pretty much everybody in California knows by now, it takes an entire gallon of water to grow a single almond, because I guess almonds are the Hummer 3 of nuts. California, thanks to its perfect climate, produces 80% of the world’s almonds, and thanks to surging worldwide demand for more, farmers have been steadily pumping their aquifers dry to grow as many of these water-hogging nuts as possible. Statewide, each year’s almond harvest consumes enough water to supply every home and business in Los Angeles for three years.

This is what I think about whenever I don’t want to get out of the shower. Yes, the drought is very, very serious and we all need to come together to survive – but if I get out of the shower right now the water I save is just going to get dumped onto some extremely absorbent almonds. Not corn or potatoes or wheat, but almonds. Nobody out there is starving to death because of almond shortages. If you’re eating almonds it’s because they’re either thinly sliced on top of your salad or because the airport bartender gave you a ceramic dish full of them along with a black paper napkin as he handed you your $13 cocktail.

This is what I tell myself as my showers creep closer to the ten minute mark. I don’t see why I should have to make any sacrifices just because half a billion middle class Chinese people now have the disposable income to buy expensive imported salty snacks.

Does China know about pretzels? How much water does it take to make pretzels?

Mad Max jokes aside, I really don’t think this drought is going to be the end of all California civilization – such as it exists in the first place. That’s not a prediction that the drought is going to end anytime soon; some scientists are saying drought could become the new normal. But I think there’s enough human capital and just regular old money-style capital floating around in this state to make the new normal about as comfortable as the old one.

Most of California’s water goes to irrigating its vast agricultural operations - and since these irrigation systems were built when water was cheap and widely available, they're extremely inefficient. There's never been an incentive to build expensive desalination plants, or to try and convince squeamish people in the suburbs to drink treated, recycled wastewater.

When those ideas were brought up pre-drought, Californians balked at them. Now, faced with the mandatory 25% reduction in water use, everybody seems a little more open minded. And that’s how progress happens in California: We let our selfish culture of conspicuous consumption work us into a corner, and then we improvise our way out again.